What Are Your Numbers?

By Debra Fendrich, Executive Editor, Pioneer Drama Service

Debra serves as the executive editor at Pioneer Drama Service, where she has worked for over 26 years. Prior to joining Pioneer Drama, she taught public school and has since volunteered extensively in the schools. Even before that, she played flute in the pit orchestra for her high school’s productions of George M! and The Music Man.

A local Pioneer customer recently told us that new administration at his middle school wanted to shut down the drama club. Crazy! But the administration would not hear his arguments... until he presented cold, indisputable numbers. With 83 members, the drama club was the largest club in the school with more than 25% of the school participating. That was more students than played soccer and basketball combined! Beyond the students, though, his program brought the parents to the school for performances, which held a huge intangible value for the administration. Even better, the parents and family members paid a few dollars each for tickets, making the drama program self-perpetuating. Not only did the drama program fund itself, but in fact, it generated funding for several other school clubs! Discontinuing the drama club would have brought the hatchet down on more than half dozen other clubs as well.

Combining these numbers with all the research you already know about kids involved in arts performing better academically and having better school attendance (see 10 Salient Studies on the Arts in Education for an excellent review of the topic), the administration not only kept the drama program but gave it even better support the following year.

So what are your numbers? During this crazy, hectic production season, you’ll find it invigorating (or exhausting!) to take five minutes and calculate your numbers. With your current play production, how many students are involved? How many lives are you touching this season? This school year? In your career?

One Pioneer customer figures that she averages approximately 40 students involved in each production, and she does three productions a year. Sure, there’s a great deal of overlap in the students involved in each show, and she has most of her students for several years. So even discounting that each show with a student is a unique experience, this teacher lowballs an estimate that in her 20-year career, she has worked with over 1000 students in the context of a production. And that doesn’t even include the audiences! She does three performances of every show, with an average of 75 audience members in attendance. Even with these modest numbers, that’s 13,500 people who have supported and encouraged the hard work of her 1000-plus students over the years!

Children’s playwright Dave Barton, who Pioneer Drama had the honor of knowing and working with for over 30 years before he passed away in 2013, was once asked to write about groups that produce his scripts. Here is a segment of what he wrote:

I estimate that between the cast, crew, and volunteers, probably 50 individuals are involved in each production of one of my shows, each putting in an average of 100 hours. I am fortunate enough that, in a good year, nearly 100 productions of my shows are staged. In total man hours, that is... 500,000 hours a year!

And that is all because people appreciate and enjoy what I have written.

A half million hours annually bringing to life the words and melodies that I have created for the enjoyment of others. OMG! I am truly overwhelmed. And honored.

So take a moment to calculate your numbers. Here’s a worksheet for you to follow if you want some guidance. These numbers should warm your heart and remind you that you really do make a difference with all your hard work. Not only that, they might just save your job.